I truly love being wowed by a masterful performance. I have been, many times over my decades of flying — the precision, the fluidity, the things that seem impossible until you watch them happen.
But there’s an even bigger experience for me. More enjoyable. More stimulating. More inspiring for my own efforts and my own thought process.
Just two days ago, a customer on the beach bought their first quad line kites from me and took their very first lesson. And as happens every single time I’m blessed to be part of that process, there were unlock points. Moments where the hands figure it out. Where you can actually see a person’s character and nature starting to show itself through the kite as they find more and more connection with the control.
Whether they find those steps organically or through some key piece of information passed to them at the right moment — every time, without fail, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. It quite often nearly brings me to tears.
That’s where this comes from.
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I’ve been thinking about this for years now. Talked about it in various articles, in classes and lessons, within my team. It’s something I started calling 𝑓𝑙𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑏𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑦 somewhere along the way, and the name stuck in my head.
Let me walk through it.
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When I watch newer pilots, most of them do the same thing.
They launch the kite and steer it around.
Left. Right. Big loops. Maybe a dive that pulls up at the last second. The kite goes where the eyes go, more or less, and the whole thing is powered by fascination.
I want to be clear right away: that is exactly how it should begin, and there isn’t anything wrong with it staying in that state. Here, I’m writing simply from the perspective of a 35+ year instructor, performer, team leader and community builder.
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Kiting occupies a strange cultural position.
Because it’s generally seen as a toy — a pastime, something for the beach bag next to the sunscreen — I don’t think most people instinctively assume there’s much underneath it.
Compare that to almost any recognized craft. When someone buys a guitar, they already assume there are years of things to learn. Scales, chords, technique, feel. Nobody is surprised that depth exists. It’s baked in before a single note gets played.
And the road is visible. Successful players everywhere you look. Teachers, schools, methods, lessons on every corner of the internet — a clear, available path from first note to real competency, proven by the millions who’ve walked it.
Same with a camera. Golf. Martial arts. Archery. In every case the assumption arrives with the purchase: this thing will take time, it will give back in proportion, and the road is potentially endless.
With kites… I’m not convinced people approach it with the same expectation.
Not because the depth isn’t there. I’ve spent over three decades in it and I haven’t found the bottom.
Part of it is cultural — a kite reads as a finished experience the moment it’s in the air. Fly it, enjoy it, put it away. What else would there be?
And part of it is that the people who might have shown otherwise were usually just flying themselves. The few who reached that caliber of clarity and depth have rarely been visible or accessible as instructors — woven quietly into the community, seldom in a position to sustain the work of passing it on. So unlike music or photography, there’s no long lineage of examples proving that what looks like talent is mostly something built. Just scattered individuals, mostly unseen.
That gap — between how much is actually there and how much people assume is there — is something I think about constantly.
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Music feels like the closest parallel to me.
Picture someone learning guitar. They don’t start with songs. They start with individual notes, then combinations, then chords, progressions, melodies, whole pieces.
And then, somewhere much further down the road, something quiet happens.
The musician stops thinking about notes. The vocabulary went so deep it disappeared from conscious view. What’s left is just… music. The player hears an idea and their hands go find it.
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I see something remarkably similar in flying.
If I had to name our “notes,” they’d be individual inputs. A pull turn. A push turn. A corner. A smooth, steady circle. A controlled stop. The basic ways a pilot speaks to the kite through the lines.
Then those notes become combinations. A square. A diamond. An octagon. A stair-step. Linked corners where each one sets up the next.
Combinations become larger sequences. Whole passages of movement. Transitions. Flow from one idea into the next.
And then, for the pilots who go far enough, the same quiet moment arrives.
They stop thinking about “making a square.”
The square is still in there somewhere, the way scales are still inside a melody. But it’s no longer the thing being thought about. The pilot is simply expressing movement, and the vocabulary shows up on its own, exactly where it’s needed.
I’ve watched this happen enough times that I no longer consider it a theory. It’s a pattern. Something builds underneath, mostly invisibly, and then one day the pilot is 𝑓𝑙𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑠 𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑎𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑢𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠.
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Which brings me to the part of this I care about most.
There’s a misunderstanding I’ve run into over and over, usually with newer pilots, and I understand exactly where it comes from.
Structured practice — drills, shapes, repeated inputs — can feel like it’s replacing creativity. Like the freedom of “just flying” is being traded away for homework. Like someone is trying to turn play into school.
I get it. If someone had framed it that way to me early on, I might have pushed back too.
But my experience has been the opposite. Not because someone told me it would be — because I’ve lived it, and watched it happen over and over.
Vocabulary doesn’t replace creativity.
𝐕𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐛𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐰𝐬 𝐨𝐧.
Every input that gets internalized becomes a place you can go without thinking about how to get there. Every shape that becomes automatic frees up attention for something else. The more of the mechanics that disappear, the more room there is for expression.
Vocabulary doesn’t shrink your flying. It keeps handing you more places to go.
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A child learning to walk shows the same pattern.
At first, every step is a project. Balance. Correction. Effort. Concentration you can see on their face. Walking is the whole activity.
Then, at some point, walking disappears. The child doesn’t think about walking anymore. They think about where they’re going. The mechanics became invisible, and what replaced them was intention.
Nobody would say the child was freer before they could walk.
That’s what I believe happens with flying. The inputs, the shapes, the drills — they’re steps. And 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑝𝑠 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑝𝑠.
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So where does this leave the pilot who just launches and steers?
Exactly where they are, and happily so.
What I see is more like a door most people don’t know is there. Not locked. Not hidden, exactly. Just unmarked.
Some pilots will walk past it their whole lives and have a wonderful time. Fascination alone is a complete experience.
And some pilots — the ones who feel a pull they can’t quite name, who sense there might be 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 in those lines than steering — deserve to know the door exists. That the depth is real. That it goes down further than anyone standing on a beach with a kite in a sleeve would ever guess.
There’s something bigger in it too. Vocabulary doesn’t just bring more freedom, more creativity — it also opens the door for the next generation of kite designers, team leaders and instructors to be born. To the benefit of us all.
That’s mostly why I wanted to write this. Not to convince anyone to practice differently — just to share some of what’s moving through my head while I’m standing there with lines in my hands.
However you fly, it’s yours. Personal, top to bottom. The wind doesn’t ask for anything, and there’s no wrong way to answer it. Whether you’re carving big loops for the simple joy of it, or you’re feeling that pull toward something you can’t quite name yet — 𝐰𝐞’𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐝.
And I love that.
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I’m curious about the rest of you — and not just kite fliers.
If you play music, shoot photos, dance, write, cook, climb, build, whatever your thing is…
𝐃𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐯𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐛𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝? The point where you stopped thinking about the notes — the steps, the settings, the mechanics — and started simply going where you wanted?
And if you’re earlier in that arc — does building vocabulary feel like freedom to you, or like homework?
Food for flight.
— John Barresi